Essential Plugins

There are over 25,000 plugins available for WordPress. This is both a blessing and a curse. The vast majority of plugins we’ve downloaded I end up trashing. One can waste heaps of time on plugins, believing they’re the answer to all ills, providing everything you need to add the features you want. Sometimes this is true for simple tasks. But a plugin is not always the best way to add that special feature or function to your site. And a bad one can slow the site down, introduce a virus or just annoy visitors.

Here’s some ones we like that are well suited for newcomers. It’s not a definitive listing and I regularly update it. My comprehensive ‘shortlist’ has around 50 I choose from.

It depends a lot on the plugins. Some have a lot of coding that needs to be executed, others very little. However I guess as a general guide I’d say try to keep it under a dozen, but I do have a few sites running 20+. Those that introduce a lot of stylesheet and javascript can slow down the site. There is a plugin (ironically), that give an indication of this overhead. http://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/